Friday, March 2, 2012

Smashwords to Distribute to Blio and Public Libraries Via New Distribution Agreement with Baker & Taylor

Smashwords today announced a distribution agreement with Baker & Taylor, one of the world's largest distributors of physical and digital books.

The agreement will expand distribution for nearly 100,000 Smashwords books to new devices and markets.

There are two components of the agreement. The first is distribution into the Blio online store and e-reading app. The second part of the agreement gains Smashwords authors and publishers distribution into the library market through Baker & Taylor's Axis360 service.

If you're not familiar with Blio, it's an online store (Blio.com) and also a popular e-reading application that has been pre-loaded on over millions of computers and devices. It powers the e-reading experience for laptops, desktops and tablets produced by Dell Computer, HP, Toshiba and T-Mobile, among others. Blio is also available in the Android store.

The agreement will also bring Smashwords ebooks to public libraries that subscribe to Baker & Taylor’s new Axis360 digital media platform. Axis360, which was launched last year, has been deployed by several top public library systems in the U.S. Dozens more libraries are converting to the platform.

Like all new Smashwords distribution channels, all Premium Catalog-approved Smashwords titles will gain automatic distribution to Blio and Axis360. As standard practice, we give authors and publishers at least 48 hours to opt out new distribution outlets if they wish, though I don't recommend opting out. This agreement will give authors and publishers important, incremental exposure for their books.

Smashwords authors and publishers will earn 60% of the list price for books sold through Blio, and 45% of the list price for books sold to libraries. The libraries are authorized to check out one purchased copy at a time. The books are DRM'd so they time out after the checkout period has expired.

sounds great, Mark. A couple questions. First, are both of these agency pricing arrangements? Second, how does Axis360 work from a end-user standpoint? Is it something visible that Amazon might price-match? My reason for asking is the nightmare that it has been getting price changes made on Kobo in a timely manner and sometimes on other outlets.

OMG this is incredible news!! Thank you so much for making this happen, Mark. I'm eagerly awaiting word on your meeting with the EFF about the whole Paypal censorship "SNAFU" but this was a phenomenally good surprise bit of news to encounter when I stopped by the blog today.

Pretty soon Mark, your Empire will be strong enough where you can say, "Now witness the selling power of this fully armed and operational indie market." Mark clicks the button on the throne's armrest. "Writers, you may publish when ready."

This is great news I look forward to having a new outlet for my writing. I have a question; since they do print books will there be a way to have any of our work put in print as well. Just curious, as form what I can tell the printed area for self-publishers is extremely expensive as far as I can tell, hence no printed versions of either my wife’s work or my work.

On the PayPal crapola well I do not write Erotic stories so it doesn’t effect me. I do however, not right exactly family friendly work either.

I did not have time to send this out to my editor so please forgive any mistakes.

This is truly excellent news. Recently, when I mentioned on a listserve for librarians that I'd collected my anthology contributions into one book, the nearly-unanimous response was, "Great, but I didn't see it on Overdrive." It's wonderful to know I can go back to them now with an alternate vendor. Thank you, Smashwords.

Thank you, Mark and the Smashwords team, for all of your efforts. Your hard work in making this happen is so greatly appreciated. This agreement with Baker and Taylor is very exciting and will open up a whole new market to us. Congratulations!

I'm pleased about this development. Baker and Taylor has distributed my paper books for decades. The library market is going to continue to grow. Both additions are something to celebrate! Yeah! Another reason to love Smashwords!

...and an apology for mixing issues here. My email from the Smashwords blog contained three issues and a link back to here. So I blithely posted the foregoing response thinking it was all part of this blog post.

This sounds like great news and I commend the Mark and the people at Smashwords for finding yet another way to get our books out there, but as a publisher we've had nothing but problems with Baker & Taylor and rarely use them anymore. The biggest problem was and is late payments - I usually have to harass my rep and the people in B&T's accounting department for months before a check is sent. I hope they treat Smashwords better than us!

@webistrator, no problem, sorry for the confusion. I removed the comment since it's not relevant to this post. Save the comment for later because it's only a matter of time before I do a post here so authors can share their views on the PayPal issue.

As an employee of one of the library systems using Axis360 - this is fabulous news. Patrons want to borrow ebooks, and as the "Big 6" lock out more and more libraries patrons will discover all the great books now being published by Indie authors. Readers want books, writers are offering them.